Sandeep Sangaru (left) won the award for Design for Social Impact and Pawan Kumar for Digital for Creative Industries; Shabnam Ramaswamy of Street Survivors gave an inspiring talk. Pictures by Pabitra Das

The British Council announced two winners of the Young Creative Entrepreneur 2012 Awards at The Park Hotel on Wednesday.

The two categories were the Design for Social Impact and Digital for Creative Industries awards — the former going to Sandeep Sangaru and the latter to Pawan Kumar.

Sangaru is a furniture designer and a graduate from NID, Ahmedabad. He incorporates the skills of local craftsmen and uses local material to create furniture that appeals to a global audience. He dedicated his award to all the artisans he works with. Other nominees in this category included Achyutha Sharma (www.poornakaksha.wordpress.com), fashion designer Paromita Banerjee, Sarang Kulkarni (www.whitecrow.in and www.handpaintedtype. com) and Suren Vikash (www.thunkinindia. com).

Theatre actor and filmmaker Pawan Kumar, who had left college halfway to make films, won the award for his new film Lucia. “I’m thankful to the British Council for acknowledging that I’m young,” joked the 29-year-old.

Lucia is the first fully crowd-funded Kannada film, a new concept in India. People from around the world chipped in with small amounts of money to fund its production without knowing the storyline or the net result of the money they were putting in. The film is 60 per cent complete now. “I gave myself 100 days to come up with Rs 50 lakh to fund the project. The money came in within 27 days — and we raised Rs 50 lakh more thanwhat was needed,” said the soft-spoken filmmaker.

The runner-up for the Digital for Creative Industries Award was Jagdish Repaswal for his online reading venture MangoReader that enables interactive reading online. Readers can learn from videos, 3D graphics, animation and context-based learning. Other nominees for this award were Arjun Jassal of www.blueant.in, Chinmayi Tripathi of www.songdew.com and Shivam Sharma of www.musicdip.in.

“This (award) honours creative entrepreneurs who use creativity to generate wealth,” said Sujata Sen, director of the British Council (east). The objective of these awards, she said, is to sensitise the UK to Indian creativity, to better understand the dynamics of a creative entrepreneur.

Shabnam Ramaswamy of Street Survivors gave a short talk on her journey as a social entrepreneur.

The panel of judges for the awards included musician Ananda Sen of The Supersonics, Anita Ahuja, founder of Conserve India, an initiative to improve the lives of rag-pickers, and Bappaditya Biswas, founder of Bailou, known for its handwoven textiles.